[Etoys] A low floor "Paint" door into eToys

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Saturday 22 Nov 2008 12:48:36 am Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>   I haven't forgotten your suggestion, but it still doesn't have the
> thing unfortunately.  But, I can show how you would do.  I made a
> little Etoys project.  Download this:
>
>   http://dev.laptop.org/~yoshiki/etoys/SimplePaint.005.pr
This is still modal. I found young children (non-English) have trouble dealing 
with such modal painting environments without "training". The paint tools are 
not child-friendly. The tool cursors has no visual feedback of the picked 
color. The circle cursor even has its hot spot at 10 O'clock instead of the 
center. The auto popup color panel is a major irritant. Just move the cursor 
from the upper part of onion skin towards "clear" or "toss" to see what I 
mean. Whatever happened to the principle of least astonishment?

Children learn to compensate for these irritants over time but is a modal 
paint tool really necessary? Many of the paint tool functions can be achieved 
if we allow children to "embed" or "stamp" by a press-n-hold or lay pen 
trails using hold-n-drag. A child can spend more time "thinking" than 
worrying about missteps.

Subbu